Foaming Far Left

It was a weekend of shocks, brought to me by the NYT. I already wrote about Sunday’s shock, in which I learned from the weekly Vows column that leaving your spouse and kids is cool. The day before, I discovered that I’m a member of the foaming far left. And here I thought I was a moderate. I was once. Then I became a liberal. And now I’m foaming.

The thing is, I never moved. It’s not me who’s changing. It’s our politics, the story of which I hardly need to detail here. We all know that policies Nixon and Reagan once enacted are now considered socialist by the far right, a group better known these days as the Republican Party. Since there has to be a center, and to the mainstream media, that center must sit somewhere between the two parties, I now have the pleasure of learning about my membership in the foaming far left.

The near-apoplectic level of agita within the liberal screeching class over President Obama’s tax-cut compromise has exposed a seismic crack in the Democratic monolith — outspoken liberal Democrats on one side and barely audible moderate Democrats on the other.

Did you catch that? Blow is equating liberal Democrats with the foaming far left. He then asks if the party is “experiencing the beginnings of a purging akin to that seen on the right.” Golly. Liberals whose views don’t differ much from Hubert Humphrey in 1968 are now not just foaming but purging the party of the Democratic Party’s moderates, who are somewhere to the right of the 1968 Nixon. A few paragraphs later, Blow refers to these purgers as “far-left liberals.” Am I to deduce that liberals are on the far left by definition?